Asclepias

Really wanted to upload a picture from my Lumix today, as I feel a little artistically limited by my iPod....

This is a monarch butterfly caterpillar feasting on a species of milkweed out in the garden. We have lots of monarchs here, including many of the white morphs, which are fair more common on the Hawaiian islands than anywhere else in the world. Monarchs started showing up on the islands around the mid 1800s, about the time that their food plant (milkweed species) was introduced, though no one can say exactly how they got here.

The caterpillar ingests the leaves of the milkweed plant, which contain a powerful toxin that they are immune to. These toxins build up in the caterpillar, and they carry them over into the other phases of their life cycle, making the monarch butterfly poisonous to potential predators.